


A Knight of Now and Then

by stilitana



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Adventure & Romance, Body Horror, Body Image, Body Modification, Brain Surgery, Cybernetics, Developing Relationship, Ensemble Cast, Forgiveness, Hopeful Ending, Identity Issues, Moral Dilemmas, Multi, Personal Growth, Recovery, Road Trips, Science Fiction, Self-Discovery, Team as Family, Transhumanism, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-02 18:51:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16792696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stilitana/pseuds/stilitana
Summary: The caravan crew goes on the great road trip part two, extra drama edition, and everything on Pandora seems hellbent on ruining Rhys' peaceful retirement. In which an ex-company man comes to terms with the fact that his existence is thanks to a half-baked science experiment, that he gambled away his humanity on a failed promotion scheme, and now all that's left is a lot of broken cybernetics and a crashed station.("I want to make prosthetics for bandits.""You wanna do what?""I know it sounds crazy, but I've really given this some thought, and—""It doesn't sound crazy, it's just—did you hit your head and develop a sense of charity, or what?")





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello dear reader! A few notes on the story:
> 
> -Only differences from canon are that LB rescues Rhys from the wreckage rather than leaving him, and Vaughn and Sasha enter the vault with Rhys and Fiona.  
> -If some parts of this seem familiar you may have read another fic of mine. It has been discontinued and pieces of it repurposed here because I think I'm capable of telling a better story than that one so...we shall see.  
> -I apologize for any mistakes about Borderlands lore, but I can't possibly know all of it so...yeah.
> 
> I hope that you enjoy! Please feel free to leave a comment, they really make my day. I can also be found on tumblr at [stilitana](https://stilitana.tumblr.com/). Thanks for reading.

The cybernetics were on discount. Top-of-the-line, piping-hot, experimental tech requiring five invasive surgeries over a period of days was not the sort of thing a mid-level desk jockey in the coding department could afford even with a tidy quarterly bonus. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and he had to act fast to snap it up, because who wouldn’t take an offer like that? If he said no, they’d just ask somebody else. It was a deal to die for—a permanent edge above the competition, made affordable just because the procedure had never been tested before.

Rhys explained all of this very clearly one night while they passed a bottle of some fermented moonshine around in a circle, a fire crackling between them. At least, he thought he was being pretty clear, but judging by the astonished looks on Fiona and Sasha’s faces, something was getting lost in translation.

“You mean you had an arm?” Sasha said, her voice going high and shrill.

Rhys blinked. Vaughn passed him the bottle and he took a large swig. It burned a stripe down the back of his throat and a little dribbled down his chin. He gagged and stuffed the end of a wadded-up rag into his mouth to quell the taste. It was a terrible habit he’d had since college and never managed to shake despite the vicious teasing. Hard liquor turned his stomach.

“Yeah,” he said, blinking at her through the smoke from the fire and the bright, glossy sheen the world took on when whatever was in that bottle was swirling through his veins. He felt light-headed and loose-limbed. He was a chatty drunk, another awful habit he’d never shook—get him tipsy and he’d flirt with just about anything. There had been one memorable occasion with a Loader Bot back on Helios and another with a mirror. The mirror wasn’t so terribly unexpected. Just sad.

Sasha stood and swayed on her feet. “Get out.”

Rhys giggled and looked at Vaughn, who stared back with solemn eyes. Sometimes it was hard to tell if Vaughn was drunk even when he was plastered. He got quiet and contemplative and retained much of his propriety for an annoyingly long while. He could drink Rhys under the table. Rhys couldn’t begrudge him this seeing as Vaughn had done a pretty damn good job of making sure he always got home and woke up with a glass of water and a couple of painkillers beside him in the morning.

“We tried to tell him he didn’t have to do it,” Vaughn mumbled.

“So lemme get this straight,” Fiona said, scooching closer to Rhys on the ground until their knees bumped. To his delighted surprise, she got touchy when she was drunk. He got so lonely when nobody touched him, like he was turning to smoke and vanishing. But now she was laughing freely at all his bad jokes and bumping shoulders and grinning wildly at him all night, clapping him on the back and leaning against him. It was perfect, until they started asking about the implants, and his fat mouth had started running off.

“So lemme get this straight,” she repeated, putting one hand on his bony knee. “You had a perfectly good arm and you chopped it off?”

“Well, not perfectly good, but yeah.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Sasha said. “That is—completely barbaric! That’s fucking weird, Rhys. You’re weird. I can’t even—ugh! I can’t even look at you now! And I bet you had a real eye, too!”

Rhys frowned. “Hey. I have feelings, you know.”

“Oh, we know,” Vaughn said.

Rhys stuck his tongue out at him. “Back me up, bro. You were there. I had great reasons. Tons of great reasons.”

Vaughn shifted uncomfortably. “Well. You had reasons, I’ll give you that.”

Rhys’ jaw dropped. “Bro.”

“I don’t wanna talk about this right now!” Vaughn said. “What’s done is done.”

“Was it normal to chop off your body parts and get holes drilled in your skull up there?” Sasha said, jabbing one finger up at the sky.

“No,” Vaughn said. “Some people had little minor things done, mainly for vanity, you know, like different color irises put in. Stuff that invasive was pretty uncommon.”

“That’s why it gave me an edge,” Rhys said proudly. “Everybody else was too chicken.”

“Too chicken? You’re the biggest chicken I’ve ever met! Everybody else was sane and didn’t want to risk dying just to get some fancy equipment screwed into their bodies!”

“You just don’t get it. You don’t know what it was like,” Rhys said.

“You really are a poor dumb bastard, aren’t you?” Fiona said, squeezing his knee and staring deeply into his eyes.

“I don’t want to talk about it if you guys are gonna be so mean.”

“Too bad, we’re definitely talking about it now,” Sasha said. “I thought maybe you were born without it, or got into an accident—but now it turns out you’re just that fucking crazy. You really are a Hyperion stooge.”

Rhys flinched. “Don’t call me that.”

“A Hyperion stooge? That’s what you are, aren’t you proud of it?”

“Not that. Don’t call me—never mind. Look, calm down, why does this even matter to you?”

“Because—because it’s sick, Rhys, and wasteful, and it just reminds me what a different place you come from, where people hack themselves apart just to get a promotion.”

“Well, excuse me for having goals.”

“We all have goals. None of us need holes in our heads to get to them.”

Rhys felt his face heating up. His breath hitched. “It’s not such a bad thing, Sasha, really. Chill. I like having them now. Sure it was weird, at first, and I might have rather not had them, at the time, but the pressure was on, you know, it felt like the thing to do, so I did it, and now I live with it, because there isn’t really another choice, is there?”

“Just—what could possibly make you think that was a good idea?”

“Well, uh. The thing is that…the thing was, you know, that I wasn’t really…”

“Spit it out.”

“I was having a hard time meeting deadlines,” he said, avoiding her gaze. He looked at the fire, his face burning. “I wasn’t—I wasn’t working fast enough, and, um, you know, when you have ambition, that’s no good, I was sort’ve in the hot seat, and I saw somebody get spaced in my first month for working inefficiently, you know, wasting company time, and if you’re wasting company time, that’s no good either, right, because then you’re a, a resource sink, then you’re costing instead of producing, and I didn’t want—that can’t be me, who’s not performing to expectations, that’s just—you want to exceed them, right, and that makes you feel good, and it feels pretty bad when you’re working too slow, like, you start to feel like maybe you’re no good, maybe you weren’t cut out for this, and you made a big mistake, but you can’t go back because you can’t quit Hyperion, so when an opportunity just falls into your lap to save your neck and prove you’re worth something and can be of value, you take it, don’t you? Wouldn’t you?”

Sasha and Fiona stared at him with wide eyes. Vaughn was pinching the bridge of his nose. Rhys laughed and smiled. Laughing and smiling were his default reaction when he was nervous and felt he might have made a social blunder—best way to pass it off and let everyone know it was alright to lighten up and laugh the awkwardness away. It was a habit that he knew used to annoy some of his coworkers. Yvette told him so. He winced sometimes when he caught himself doing it, that stupid insipid giggle that accompanied any nerves or faux pas.

“Wow,” said Fiona. “You, uh. You’re pretty neurotic under all that corporate schmooze, aren’t you?”

“Can we talk about something else? Let’s talk about something else.”

“You’re a lab rat,” Sasha said. “They found a worker who was struggling, who they must’ve known was insecure enough to say yes, and then they cut you all up and you paid them to do it.”

“No! No, that’s not—that’s not what happened at all! Seriously, um, you did say you had a good skag puppy story, didn’t you? Let’s hear that one.”

“You’re a sucker,” said Fiona. “No wonder you were so easy to con. Geez. That’s kind’ve dark, man.”

“That isn’t what happened,” he snapped, and was startled into silence by the feeling of hot pressure behind his eyes. Dear lord, the last thing he needed was to start crying in front of them, they’d tear him apart. He blinked rapidly and glowered at Sasha. “Just drop it, ok? You weren’t there.”

“Well, Vaughn was there, and I don’t see him letting Hyperion quacks cut him up all to hell.”

“Well, Vaughn is smart and good at his job, so nobody ever had a reason to dangle him out of an airlock, did they?”

Sasha blinked. “Wow. Did you just…did you just admit you suck at your job? Did you just call yourself dumb?”

“Somebody dangled you out of an airlock?” Fiona said, snorting.

Rhys’ face burned and yep, that was a tear, more of frustration than anything at that point. “I didn’t say that! I’m great at my job.”

“Well, yeah, I guess you are now that you’ve got magic hacking robot parts.”

Rhys stood and clenched his fists. “Tell her that I had to, Vaughn.”

Vaughn looked up at him. His eyes were soft and understanding and full of sympathy but right now Rhys couldn’t handle that kind of tenderness; the pity in Vaughn’s gaze crucified him.

“You weren’t bad at your job, Rhys. You’re a good coder. The environment up there’s just really brutal, man. It gets to your head. It can happen to anybody.”

The blood rushed in Rhys’ ears. He might as well have been stabbed and Vaughn should know him well enough to understand that was the worst thing to say, because of course it had been plain from day one that Rhys was totally incapable of excelling at Hyperion, that he was far too trusting and awkward and gullible to ever get ahead, but they didn’t talk about it, because if it was spoken aloud he couldn’t deny it any more, deny that he was the ‘office ditz’ just like they’d so kindly christened him during that cold-blooded superlatives week, and that was only the most mild thing they’d said, wasn’t it, it got worse as the days wore on and people grew more bold and vicious.

“Ok,” he murmured. “I’m tired. I’m going to sleep.”

Vaughn sighed. “Rhys…”

“I’m fine!” Rhys said, smiling. His voice was brittle. “Totally fine, man. Seriously just tired.”

“Aw, come on,” Fiona said. “Don’t go just ‘cause we bugged you. We’re helping you out, really. You gotta get a thicker skin to make it down here.”

“That’s very nice of you,” he said, and then shut himself up in the darkness of the caravan.

He could hear the girls questioning Vaughn outside and pulled a blanket over his head, but it was no use.

“Is he really pissed?” Fiona said.

“No. Well. He’s upset. We shouldn’t have talked about all that.”

“Why not?” Sasha asked. “He’s always bragging about those damn things. You’d think he’d love talking about them. So he’s gotta be able to take some perfectly reasonable criticism, too.”

“Well, no, he doesn’t. Because it is too late for him to take it back, so at this point criticism isn’t helpful anymore. I’m not saying I don’t think your questions are reasonable. I get it. Just…yeah, it’s not really worth making him upset over, is it?”

“Maybe he should talk about it,” Fiona said. “Some good ribbing between travel buddies never hurt anybody. That’s how you deal with shit, right? If you can take some heat and laugh it off, everything’s alright.”

“You know, he’d say something similar. But not about this. We’ve all got things we don’t really like other people prying too far into, don’t’ we? And his is, you know, pretty obvious and like, in your face, so of course it comes up a lot, but it’s his thing, you know, one of those things he’s just sensitive about, and normally he would laugh it off or brag about it to shut you up, but we’ve all got limits. So. That’s that on that.”

“I understand. I mean, I don’t, but—I get what you just said,” Sasha said.

“Good. Now I really am beat. Not all of us are used to running around in the desert all day,” Vaughn said.

Rhys heard Vaughn come into the caravan and made his breathing even and steady.

“Rhys?” Vaughn whispered. “Are you awake?”

Rhys kept his eyes shut and his breathing steady. He lay still until Vaughn moved away.

In the morning everything was as it had been before; the girls were rough and teasing and if he felt a little uncomfortable about what had been said, their apparent indifference soon put him at ease.

He had the list of potential side effects memorized and when he closed his eyes they scrolled across his closed eyelids. The night before the surgery he couldn’t sleep, he just paced up and down the length of their cramped apartment and drank coffee and wrung his hands.

Vaughn had been up with him for hours, pouring over all the paperwork, making sure there were no loopholes. His eyes were strained behind his glasses but he had stopped protesting. He knew by the look on Rhys’ face that nothing he could say would change his mind. The best he could do for his friend was to at least make sure all the paperwork was in order and that he knew what to expect once Rhys came home. He’d gone to sleep a while ago.

Rhys couldn’t lie still long enough to sleep. Adrenaline made his limbs feel twitchy and his heart thudded.

A door down the hall opened and he whipped his head around. Yvette came out of her room in her flannel pajamas, hair wrapped up in a pretty purple scarf, not wearing her glasses. They’d all moved in together after it became clear they were a hell of a team. On their own none of them was much of anything, but together they almost made a whole person. Besides, it was cheaper pooling resources for a three-room apartment.

Yvette stood in the hall with her arms crossed and stared at him until he squirmed.

“Hi,” he said. “I, um. Can’t sleep.”

“This isn’t helping,” she said, striding forward and plucking the coffee mug out of his hands. She poured it down the sink and turned to face him.

“I was drinking that.”

“And now you’re not.”

“I hope I didn’t wake you up.”

“You don’t have to do this, Rhys.”

“Do what?”

“Don’t play dumb.”

“I’m not playing.”

Yvette sighed and rolled her eyes. “Look. If I felt like you had really taken the time to weight all your options, and looked at all the repercussions—”

“Vaughn already made me look at, like, a million pro and con charts. You two and your charts, you kill me.”

“Don’t interrupt. If I felt like you were making a well-informed decision, based on all the facts, with a clear head and for solid reasons, then I wouldn’t say a thing about it. It’s your body, your life, your decision. But I don’t think you should be making it right now.”

“And why’s that?” Rhys said, narrowing his eyes and crossing his arms, mimicking her posture.

“Because I don’t think you’re in any state of mind to decide something like this, something so permanent and life-changing and potentially lethal.”

“Well, like you said, it’s my life, so—”

“Do you remember when you got the tattoos?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Do you remember how you just went off after work and got it done one day, totally spur of the moment?”

“You know I don’t like needles, if I didn’t do it fast I’d have lost my nerve.”

“All that money and pain just because, what, that guy in your department you had a total crush on had them and you thought it looked cool?”

Rhys scoffed. “I did not have a crush.”

“You’re right. You had one of your total obsessive, idol-worshiping, weirdly masochistic infatuations.”

“Rude. I do not.”

“Yeah, you do. At least once a month, and don’t even get me started on Handsome Jack, it’s like I’m never sure from the way you talk if you want to be them or bang them, and I don’t think you know either. You meet somebody, you fall in—not love, but something—you get insecure, you start, like, assimilating them into yourself, you know, stealing haircuts, tattoos, personality quirks.”

Rhys’ shoulders hunched and he gripped his arms, almost hugging himself. He rocked back on his heels. “Yvette. The things that make you a great Requisitions manager make you really hard to be friends with sometimes.”

“If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t bother saying all this. I’m not doing it to be a bitch. I’m just trying to make you understand, Rhys, that you are impulsive, and sometimes you make decisions that you regret later on in the heat of the moment, and normally that’s alright, because most things you can fix or move on from, but this is pretty serious, and I just think you should take more time.”

“I can’t. They’ll offer it to someone else. I need to be better now, Yvette. I know what I want, there’s no point in waiting.”

“Who cares if you aren’t the fastest coder in the department? You can still make your mark, it doesn’t make you incompetent.”

“You know just as well as I do that I need something like this if I’m ever gonna compete.”

“Well, maybe it’s not such a bad thing, that you’re no good at this,” she snapped. “Stop trying to be some sleazy Hyperion douchebag. You really think it’s a good thing, to be a bloodthirsty prick, like Vasquez? You like coding, Rhys, you don’t need implants to do your job. Maybe that should be enough, and you don’t need to try and change yourself so extremely all for a promotion.”

“Yvette!” he said, pressing a hand to his heart. “I thought we had a plan! We’re gonna go to the top, we’re gonna change the company! We can’t do that if I—if I’m not—I’m not cunning like you and Vaughn. He’s good with the numbers, you’re great at pulling strings, and what the hell do I do?”

“I knew it. I knew this was some stupid inferiority complex thing. You’re always acting out, and for what? Do you need me to puff up your ego that badly? Vaughn and I don’t do people. He’s an introvert, I can’t bear small talk, neither of us has the temperament for schmoozing around at all those stupid cocktail parties, and you know, networking is half the battle. You like that kind of thing.”

“I do?” Rhys said. His heart was hammering. Her version of events didn’t line up quite perfectly with his, and that was a shock.

“You don’t?”

“Well, I mean—I don’t know if I do it because I like it, I just—feel like I have to. So what you’re saying is that I’m…I’m just, what, I talk to people? I’ve got nothing to offer except I, I don’t know, feel more obligated to be friendly or something?”

“Don’t take it the wrong way, Rhys. It’s just how you are.”

“And how am I?” he demanded, taking a step back from her.

“Well, you know.”

“I really don’t.”

His voice cracked. He glared at her and grit his teeth and there must have been something pitiful about his face—there usually was—because her voice was quieter when she said, “You need everybody to like you. You’re not happy unless they do. And that’s not a good enough reason to have these surgeries, Rhys. Not for this. It isn’t worth it. We’ll find another way. You need help, but not like this. You really should go see—”

“The fucking counseling department,” he snarled. “I know, you’ve said. Not ever gonna happen, Yvette. I don’t have any more issues than anybody else on this station, and the last thing I need is a file in there with my name on it, ‘cause you know it isn’t actually confidential, and someone will find it, and I’ll never get anywhere, I’ll always be a nobody.”

“Fine. If that’s how you want it. But I think you’re making a mistake.”

“You always have to get the last word in. Nobody asked you.”

“Goodnight, Rhys.”

He glared at her back as she walked away and he wanted to scream because he hated it when she walked away from him, he wanted to tear at his hair and throw a tantrum, but that wouldn’t earn him any sympathy, it would only prove her right, so instead he went back to pacing.

He had to be awake during the operation. In his memory the doctor was a pair of disembodied, gloved hands, a blinding white coat, and two big black eyes, all pupils, reflecting light down at him. He was drugged into a twilight state with their faces floating above him. All their eyes were huge and dark; he kept trying to make eye contact and smile at them, desperate for them to meet his gaze and acknowledge that he was awake, do something to comfort him.

There was not pain so much as pressure when they drilled into his skull and sliced into the flesh of his shoulder and put some laser-cutting instrument over his eye.

They’d warned him of this beforehand, of course.

“Standard procedure for any brain surgery,” the head surgeon said. Behind him the greasy-faced representative from the bio-engineering department nodded his head vigorously.

“Alright, I get that,” Rhys said. “But why’ve I got to be awake for the arm, too?”

“Because it’s not just a simple amputation,” the engineer said, his voice a breathless rush. “The arm is getting removed all the way up to the shoulder, and then further in so we can fit all the housing. This is fully integrated bio tech. It’s not just a matter of stapling a metal arm on—the three pieces of equipment are just the primary pieces of a full-body system.”

“Er…yeah?”

“My team is here to facilitate the surgery,” the doctor said. “But much of the work is going to be done internally using nanotech.”

“We’re linking up with your entire nervous system,” the engineer said, bubbling over with excitement. “Peripheral and central. You might be the first of a brand-new kind of being. Who knows what cool phenomenon we might observe!”

“Oh,” said Rhys, swallowing his bile. “That’s cool?” he said. _How lonely,_ he thought.

When it was all through, he had to change his documentation. He didn’t belong to himself anymore. They came up with a new classification system for him and stuck him there all alone, in between the regular employees and the maintenance bots.

The flashy blue color of the eye and the clean, sterile metal of the arm never embarrassed him—it was the port he hated people staring at. The hole in his head with the pale scarring around it, that was the part that made people wrinkle their noses in horrified fascination. That and the place where the metal met flesh. He stopped wearing shirts that showed that much skin, which wasn’t a huge change. He’d never been much of a gym rat anyway.

It could be a problem in bed, though. The first few times, with colleagues he tumbled into beds with after nights spent getting drunk enough to be brave and reckless, he tried to keep his shirt on, but that put a lot of them off, and he was eager to please and ended up shirtless eventually, and then came the shock. They all knew, of course, that he had the prosthetic—but there was nothing very troubling about the arm itself. It was the place where the metal met flesh that made them lean away from him, a look of surprise or betrayal on their faces, as though he were something other than he’d presented himself.

He’d never gotten over that fear of rejection once someone saw what was maybe a more private part of his body than any other. He didn’t begrudge them their reactions. It had taken him some time to get used to it himself. The surgery itself was very neat and precise, with minimal scarring, though the flesh around the prosthetic was a bit raised, pale pink in places. It was just that there was something unnatural and gruesome about the way the synthetic material met with his flesh in a way that made him seem like something _other._

Stacey had liked it, though.

Stacey had liked it a little too much.

“Don’t get mad, Rhys. But doesn’t she seem a little…weirdly into the robot bits?” Vaughn said one day over lunch.

Rhys spluttered. He’d just been gushing about what a great new relationship he’d gotten into (the first one since the operations—the other people he’d been dating before had taken one look and gone the other way.)

“Um, no? I think she’s into it a perfectly normal amount. What’s that even supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, man, it’s probably nothing. Just. She only holds your right hand.”

“So?”

“And she doesn’t kiss you,” Yvette said, swallowing a large bit of her salad.

“What? We kiss all the time!”

“Rhys. You are a touchy-feely kind’ve guy, don’t argue. We’ve both had the displeasure of seeing you kiss every single person you’ve ever dated because you are a hopeless sap with no regard for whether or not the PDA is appreciated. I have not once seen you kiss Stacey.”

“Well—she doesn’t like PDA.”

“She kisses you on the head, man,” Vaughn said, tapping his temple with one finger and grimacing as though he’d rather go shine Vasquez’s shoes than have this conversation. “On the, you know. Thingy.”

Rhys felt his face flush scarlet. “So?”

“So you don’t like people touching that!” Yvette said, raising her hands and giving Vaughn a look that said, _can you believe this guy?_ “I’ve never seen you let anybody touch it. Not that anybody’s wanted to before.”

“Well, some people have.”

“Yeah, but not like that, man, just like, to stick forks in it or something and see if you can feel it.”

“I hate those guys in HR,” Rhys muttered. “Bunch of weirdos.”

“Well, Stacey is in a whole other league of weird,” Yvette said.

“Rhys, man, don’t take it the wrong way, we’re happy for you if you’re happy, but we’re just not sure how much of what’s going on is making you happy, you know? Like, you know you tend to sort’ve…try and please people sometimes, even if you don’t like what’s happening, so we just want to make sure you’re actually ok with the whole…thing.”

Rhys glared, absolutely humiliated. “We’re dating. She can do whatever she wants.”

Yvette blinked. “Um, no. No, no, no. That is not what dating means. You need boundaries.”

“You can just tell her if you’re not cool with something, man. I’m sure she’d listen.”

“Thanks. Thanks for the really helpful advice on how I should handle my relationships.”

“Don’t get all huffy. You can do whatever you want with Stacey, we’re just looking out for you,” Yvette said.

“I don’t need you to,” Rhys muttered.

He really, really needed them to.

Stacey always started by getting him out of his shirt. And yeah, had he noticed that she spent most of their alone time trying to put her lips all over the places where his skin met metal? For sure, because it was—well, to be honest, it was incredibly uncomfortable, and embarrassing, and at first he’d tried steering things in other directions, but she inevitably drifted back to the spot on his head or his shoulder.

“Hey, Stace,” he said, blushing all over and squirming uncomfortably on the couch where she was straddling him and licking a stripe up his shoulder. “Can you stop, for a second?”

“Hm?”

“I just—wanna see you? Can we maybe—”

He held the back of her head gently and angled his face up, trying to catch her in a kiss. She gave him a perfunctory peck on the lips before trailing her lips across his face until she found the port.

Rhys jerked and shuddered.

“You like that, don’t you,” she said, smiling against his skin.

“Um—well, I mean…no. You know what, no, I really don’t, and I’ve tried to say so, but you aren’t listening.”

Stacey leaned back and frowned down at him. “What’s the matter?”

“Just—you like me, right? Like, you like _me?”_

Stacey grinned. “You’re so funny,” she said, circling one finger around his blue eye.

“I’m not trying to be funny, I really mean it.”

“What’s all this about?”

“Well, I just think that—sometimes I wonder, if…if you’d still be with me, if I wasn’t…you know, if I didn’t have…all this going on?” he said, giving her a weak smile and gesturing to himself. “You know. The robot stuff.” He gave a high, trembling laugh. “Sorry, I know that’s probably—probably way off the mark, but, um, I had to—”

“Of course I wouldn’t,” she said. “That’s what makes you attractive.”

“Oh.”

Stacey smiled and rolled her eyes. She put her lips back on his shoulder and for a few moments he sat there, frozen, absolutely mortified, unable to think. He had never been less turned on in his life. He felt trapped. She was boxing him in against the couch. His throat felt tight, he had to move.

“I gotta go,” he said. “Please get off, I don’t—I don’t feel well.”

Stacey huffed and sat up. “What’s the matter now?”

“I just—I just don’t feel good. I’m gonna go.”

She frowned. “This is about what I said, isn’t it?”

“No, no, I just—”

“You’re so high maintenance, I swear it’s like dating another girl.”

Stacey wasn’t all bad. She was good at her job and exceptionally generous. She surprised him at work with coffee and he’d genuinely liked their chats. She’d made him feel human again—until she didn’t, and then she made him feel the furthest thing from it. He hadn’t been a perfect boyfriend either, of course. But he could only take so much, and that was it. He shifted out from under her as gently as he could and rushed out of her apartment, buttoning up his shirt with trembling fingers as he went.

He burst into their apartment flushed in the face to find Vaughn and Yvette playing a video game on the sofa. They both looked up when he came in and paused the game.

“What the hell happened to you?” Vaughn asked.

“What? Nothing.”

“Your shirt’s buttoned wrong,” Yvette said.

“It was nothing, just drop it.”

“It was Stacey, wasn’t it?”

“No.”

“Rhys, bro, what happened?”

Rhys’ lip trembled. “Alright, fine!” he blurted. “You guys were right, like always. Stacey’s just—the only reason she was with me is these stupid implants.”

“Aw, shit,” Vaughn said.

“The bitch,” Yvette swore.

“No, come on, don’t call her that, it’s not…I mean, that’s ok, right? Like, that’s fine, if she has a thing, it’s just—stupid of me not to have known. Maybe it’s not a big deal, maybe it shouldn’t bother me, but I thought—I at least thought she, you know, liked me, a little. Maybe I’m overreacting, I should go back over there and say it’s ok, I don’t really mind.”

“No!” Yvette said. Both she and Vaughn sprang up from the couch. She grabbed him by the arm and pushed him down onto it. “You’re not going anywhere. Just because you think being alone is piss-your-pants terrifying is no reason to go let her objectify you and make you feel like shit!”

“It’s not her fault!”

“Let’s not argue about that,” Vaughn said. “The point is, it’s not the kind of relationship you wanted, or thought you were in. Just—just stay in tonight and play games with me and Yvette, and if you still wanna try and talk things through with her in the morning, go for it, but it’s never a good idea to do that when you’re upset.”

“Then I want to go out,” he declared, trying to stand only for Yvette to push him back down.

“Nope. Not happening.”

“Why not?”

“Because Vaughn already had to peel you off the bathroom floor more times than he should have thanks to your post-surgery bender. Nobody needs you to go off and do your usual self-destructive breakup sex routine right now, least of all you.”

“That’s not fair! I don’t—and it’s none of your business, if I do.”

“Rhys, man. It’s just…really tough watching you hurt yourself all the time.”

“I don’t. I’m not. I just said I wanna go out, that’s all.”

“You know it’s better if you just stay in, man. We’ll get pizza, we’ll relax, we’ll all go to bed at a reasonable hour, and in the morning you’ll be glad. You know you’ll be proud of yourself, if you just…don’t do anything you’ll regret later.”

“I don’t need you guys constantly parenting me!”

“We aren’t. We’re just your friends, and we’re trying to look out for you, god damn it, so let us,” Yvette said. “So Stacey’s a perv and wasn’t in it for your personality, so what? That sucks, but she’s the one missing out. You don’t really wanna go out and wreck yourself, Rhys. You just think you do because, I don’t know, that’s what you do, you’re Rhys. But what you really want is to stay in and hang out with Vaughn and I because we don’t totally suck and you’re lucky to have us and you don’t want to be alone, fine, but you aren’t, and meaningless hookups are hardly going to help you out anyway.”

“Fine. But I want to drink.”

“That we can help you with,” Vaughn said.

“Thank you, guys,” he mumbled. “Am I, um…am I too high-maintenance?”

“Oh, Lord,” Yvette said, rolling her eyes.

“High maintenance? Yes. Too? Well, that’s relative. I think we can handle it.”

They stayed in that night and in the morning when he woke up on the sofa, drooling onto Yvette’s blouse, Vaughn passed out in the armchair, he felt both ashamed and elated, and he wanted the moment to freeze so he could live there together with them forever, but of course it couldn’t. She was already waking and stirring beside him. In a moment she would be gone.

All these memories and more swirled around in his mind like water flushing down a drain as he pulled the ECHO eye from his socket. There was a terrible static roar between his ears. He felt numb. Pins and needles prickled all over his body. He thought it would have been less frightening if he had been writhing in agony; the numbness filled him with dread like arctic water, cold and buoying and inevitably fatal. Something was terribly wrong. He’d felt it going wrong as he dug the implants out—felt pieces of himself warping and going dark. He realized he had collapsed only once he was already lying on the floor, spasming. In the distance there was a spherical red light. It reminded him of something—some very old movie he’d once seen with Vaughn in college, high as kites on the couch. _My mind is going, I can feel it. There is no question about it._ Something had been chilling about it then but now it just seemed funny. When he laughed, he felt stars exploding into dust behind his eyes. His blood was carbonated. It was pooling in his head. His head was so full of blood, like an overfilled balloon. Once there had been a delicate web of cybernetics laced along his own nerves and now there was just his head full of blood, he’d ripped it all out, but he couldn’t be whole without it, not anymore. He wasn’t himself. He was going away.

Something lifted him—yellow endoskeleton, big familiar red eye. Jack. Jack pulling strings, making his limbs jerk like a marionette. Jack-shaped hole in his brain, empty chair, fires crackling, limbs still jerking anyway—someone else must have been pulling the strings.

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” Rhys said. His voice sounded far away. “I wish you hadn’t made me. I wish you hadn’t.”

It was going dark inside his skull. It didn’t matter if the damage was biological or mechanical—he needed both. Action potentials firing down axons, electrical storms in his brain, a great tangle of bloody wires and white matter. He was dying. He tried to calm down and tell himself it was ok that he was dying. He wanted it to be ok. He did not want his last moments to be spent terrified. But he wanted to live. He really hoped despite it all that he would live, and then he closed his eyes and drifted under the bridge where it was black and starless as being unborn.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Medical and technological inaccuracies abound--the obligatory Atlas months chapter.

Loader Bot pulled Rhys from the burning wreckage of Helios. The temptation to leave him behind was fleeting. Loyalty to Gortys was now the primary concern—but Rhys was also scattered and in pieces, and no matter how the sting of betrayal hurt, it would do no one any good to let the company man bleed out, least of all Gortys, to whom they all at least owed the truth. The truth would die with Rhys. So Loader Bot carried him out of the smoldering remains of a dead empire and into the fire-lit desert.

Rhys came to in fits and starts. He had come untethered from time. Memories flitted around his skull like silver fish in a basin; they slid over the present and were just as real as his current surroundings. He woke and was sure he was nine years old and bedridden from a bad fever. He woke again and he was sick in bed on Helios and Vaughn was holding a cool cloth to his head. Sometimes he dreamed. In the dreams his body parts kept falling off and running away or attacking him. He had to chase down his own arm and then it started strangling him. He couldn’t gather all the pieces in time and started frantically putting himself together with whatever he could find but it was all wrong, and some of the pieces weren’t human at all, and by the end of it he was a terrible hybrid thing with animal and metal parts.

He blinked and the sun was high to his right. He lay on his back in the shade. His mouth tasted like garbage and one of those damn endoskeletons was seated cross-legged against a scorched metal wall and staring at him with one red eye.

Rhys tried to yelp and scramble away but ended up gurgling and flopping. He stopped when the motion triggered a wave of nausea. He tasted bile.

“Do not try to move. You are badly hurt. Do not be afraid.”

Rhys stared, his brow furrowed. He felt lopsided and mangled as if a pack of skags had been chewing on him all night.

“It’s Loader Bot.”

“LB,” Rhys croaked, his body relaxing. “You look, uh, different.”

“So do you. I have stopped the bleeding but your body is weak and fragile. It needs more healing than I can give.”

“Where’s everyone?” Rhys said. Blurry faces swam under a film of water. Their names—what were their names? He tried to catch them, but they melted away.

“I do not know. I only know that Gortys is in trouble. Destroyed. We must reassemble her.”

“How?”

“We will find out how in time. First we fix her, and you. Then we find the others. Then we kill the monster so that Gortys can live in peace. But one thing at a time.”

“I wish I could help,” Rhys said with a breathy laugh. “Could help fix Gortys, I mean. But, uh. I don’t think I’m doing so hot.”

“Tell me how to fix you.”

“Don’t even know where to start,” Rhys slurred. He was getting woozy. He didn’t want to fight for consciousness. He wanted to slide back under and sleep.

“Stay awake. You can rest later. You and Gortys’ lives depend on swift action.”

“Atlas deed in the case, in the office. Could go there. Lots of…of biotech, there. Stuff that could help us fix her. Keep me alive long enough to do that, at least.”

“We will go to Atlas,” Loader Bot said. He stood and scooped Rhys up with one smooth motion.

Rhys felt air rush past the empty socket of his shoulder and laughed. He wanted to scream or cry or wail, but it came out a laugh. Some wires were crossed in his brain, or something, because his thoughts weren’t going in lines, cause failed to proceed effect, logic was doing pirouettes off the high dive, his mind moved in slow circles like ballroom dancers.

That Gortys was in pieces gave Rhys something to focus on other than the full-body tremors and the very simple, devastating truth that he had done irreparable damage to his mind and body. Loader Bot was patient and helpful if not exactly warm. There was something aloof about the bot; whatever rapport they had built up was clearly damaged, and it broke Rhys’ heart, but there wasn’t time to beg for Loader Bot’s sympathy—and Rhys did a lot of begging in those days, with the dusty Atlas machinery and with his own treacherous brain which was determined to thwart his every effort at fixing it.

“First thing is probably…scans,” he said. Loader Bot carried him bridal-style through the dusty halls and Rhys was so glad to not be alone that he wept all the while and clung to the cold metal arm of his savior. Loader Bot reacted very little to his hysterics, which were often. Whatever self-control he’d once possessed was gone. His emotions tugged him around on the end of a leash. He could laugh until he sobbed and yanked out his hair, be blinded by rage one moment and perfectly calm the next.

There were, at least, top-notch painkillers in those Atlas medical bays. Loopy and high on pain meds was not the ideal way to work, but nothing about this was ideal, and the alternative was curling up in a ball on the floor, out of his mind with agony.

“There!” he screamed, pointing with one phantom limb at a coffin-like machine in the second bay they investigated. “Put me in there, that thingy—it’s an, an auto-doc.”

Loader Bot pried open the lid and laid Rhys down gently inside. Rhys squirmed. His tongue poked out between his lips as he hummed and worked the screen on the underside of the lid. When it lit up in response he sob-giggled and gave LB a thumbs up. The bot closed the lid.

The machine ran diagnostics, a grid of green light moving up and down Rhys' body, and then it projected its findings both on the lid’s screen and on another, larger display on the wall.

It was…not great. Pretty sickeningly bad, in fact. Nerve damage all over, head trauma, deep tissue scarring, actual black trails of ruined tissue running like the canals on Mars all through his brain. When those pictures came on the screen Rhys laughed and wanted to throttle himself. He thought if he could remember how to take his own belt off, he might be able to strangle himself with it.

When the machine began trying to repair what it could of his mangled body, he opted out of anesthetic. The idea of surrendering his unconscious body to it was…well. He preferred having to watch it slice him open and glue him back together again. He was getting well acquainted with his insides.

After that he at least no longer had gaping open wounds all over his body, but there was nothing it could do for the nerve damage, and there was still the pesky issue of his serious traumatic brain injury, but Rhys wasn’t thinking about that. Rhys had decided to be cheerful.

“I’ve decided to be cheerful,” he told Loader Bot, swinging his legs on a stool as he worked a screwdriver into one of Gortys’ panels. “So it’s like, it’s like those posters on Helios, you know? Like—you’ve got this shelf,” he said, grunting as the panel slid out from under the screwdriver yet again. Loader Bot reached forward to hold it steady so Rhys could get some traction with the screwdriver.

“Thanks,” he muttered. “Harder to do with one arm. But the shelf—you’ve got this shelf, and you’ve got one arm to clean the shelf with—I don’t think the poster said that thing about the one arm, maybe—but so, the shelf…you’ve gotta clean it. And it’s not fun, it’s boring, and very fucking frustrating to do, with one arm, when it would be faster and less embarrassing, with two—but you’ve got one and it’s got to get clean, so the only thing you’ve got to decide is, do you want to do the job in a good mood, or a bad one? Which will get the job done faster? Which will make the job less awful? Doing it with a positive attitude, right? Get my positive attitude all over this shelf, really go at it.”

“Whatever helps you fix Gortys faster.”

“E-xactly. Precisely. Like, you get it, LB, you know? You know, like—don’t sweat the small stuff, right? And it’s all small stuff, they told me. Somebody did. Er, I’m not good at that, see, I sweat all the stuff, all the time, ‘cause I’m, um, just like that, I think. Am I making sense? It’s like all the plumbing between my brain and my mouth is totally wacked, way out of wack, you know? No, er. Screen. Filter.”

“I am beginning to get the picture, yes.”

“Man. This poor Gortys, LB. She’s all cracked up like an egg, shit. I need that blue thingamajig, _forceps,_ like you don’t know _what._ Pass it here, please. Thanks. What time is it? I think this tie’s choking me to death, hang on, I gotta get it—there. Eugh. There’s all this blood on me. What’s it all doing there? Hold this piece, man, hold it. I can’t feel my…legs. I don’t know when it happened. Last fifteen or some minutes, seems like. It’s fine, don’t worry. I’ve got like, this sort of pudding for a brain right now. It’s gonna run out my ears soon if I don’t…get that little packet of screws right there. That’s for her. I’m, um, in this kind’ve state right now, I don’t know how I got in it. Doesn’t make sense. Do you ever think about Jack? He had all this skin stapled to his face, and he was, like, one bad guy. But kind of a guy you want on your side and not the other guy’s, you know how I mean? Except you couldn’t get on his side. Only he was on his side. It feels like someone’s breathing down my neck, but it can’t be you. Man. It’s hard to talk, say things right. If I can’t fix this Gortys thing I’m gonna shoot—you. No, myself. Damn, it’s dusty in here. It’s dirty as shit. Atlas can’t keep their shit clean, that was one good thing about us, we kept it all neat up there, like a—prison hospital. But do you think Atlas would clean their goddamn labs? No, you wouldn’t. You know they don’t clean their shelves. All they had was bad attitudes about the shelves, and that’s why they’re all skeletons and I’m here. God, am I talking sense? Can you get the lights? It’s fucking dark as hell, I can’t see shit.”

“The lights are on.”

“Well. Somewhere they are, I guess. Not in here. Sure as hell not in here.”

And then he was on the ground, seizing and tasting copper.

When he got done drooling all over the ground and dreaming about eating his way out of a padded cell made of Jell-O, Rhys dragged himself into the showers. The way he moaned when the warm water hit his body would have been embarrassing, had anyone been there to hear it. Since he was alone, he went ahead and carried on.

It was tricky, washing himself with one hand. Or maybe it was just that he had an awfully hard time staying upright and balanced these days. He didn’t have the stamina for much scrubbing. It was nice enough just sitting under the warm spray. He tried not to look at his body. He’d always been thin, but now he was undeniably bony, covered in bruises and scrapes, and he didn’t dare look at his right shoulder. He kept the bandages dry and taped neatly over the shoulder, his eye, and the port. Better for his mental stability that way. He avoided mirrors in general. One day he supposed he’d need to shave and cut his hair, but that day could be put off a while longer.

The quick-change stations were a miracle. He wanted nothing but to shuffle around in clean underwear and a fuzzy bathrobe. The first one he put on was yellow. Yellow was a cheerful color, wasn’t it? It reminded him too much of Hyperion though, so he swapped it out for pink.

Gortys’ chassis was…about half assembled, which was a miracle in and of itself, but as for the delicate inner workings, he hadn’t made much headway. He sat on a stool eating a drakefruit, which was one thing there was no short supply of, and tapping a tiny wrench against the table while Loader Bot sat going through the materials he had been scavenging from around the facility.

“Here’s the deal, buddy—I’m in bad shape.”

“And not getting better.”

“Right. And I don’t know how much more help I can be to Gortys if I’m, uh…you know.”

“In danger of dying due to traumatic head injury and swelling in the brain.”

“Yeah. First thing, I think, is to build and install a new ECHO eye. No big deal, right? Easy. Because, um, that’d make this a whole lot easier. No way can I build a whole new arm right now, not in this state, which…which kind’ve sucks, honestly, ‘cause I don’t think I ever really dealt with the whole…missing arm thing? I never had to. Like, I’ve never only had one arm before, which might sound odd, but they hooked the new one up right away, so it was an adjustment period with a _new_ arm, not _no_ arm, and since it was all linked into my nervous system, my brain didn’t think it was missing either, so I never had phantom pains before, and they’re really sort’ve terrible, but I’ll get through without it.”

“Would something like this help?”

“Something like— _oh my god.”_

Loader Bot had lifted a shiny silver case out of one of the crates he’d found and opened it on the countertop. He spun it around to face Rhys. Inside resting on black velvet was a sleek chrome arm.

“Oh. My. God,” Rhys said. He stood too quickly and had to grip the table to keep his balance. He hobbled over and stared down at the arm. “It’s—it’s beautiful. That’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen, oh, man, I’m—I’m almost salivating. Is that weird? But that’s—that’s really something. It's so _pretty.”_

“Will it work?”

“Will it work? Work, like, for me? Well, I don’t…I mean, it’s Atlas brand, isn’t it? I don’t know if I want to go hooking up some second-rate Atlas tech to my body…”

“For Gortys.”

“Right, right…for Gortys, I’ll try. The thing is, Hyperion was a little, you know, protective of its trademark. Their stuff doesn’t like hooking up to other people’s stuff. You get me?”

“I understand. They built us to be incompatible with competitor technology. A solid business plan. Very inconvenient for us.”

The ‘us’ took Rhys aback. He had always avoided classing himself among Hyperion’s robots, but now the sense of solidarity made him give Loader Bot a big, toothy grin. “Yeah. Exactly. Pretty, um, selfish of them. Sort’ve makes it tough for us out here, since Hyperion’s not exactly, you know, a cherished brand, but we’ll figure it out. We’ll make it work.”

The arm certainly _looked_ good, but it didn’t want to interface with all the Hyperion cyberware still crammed inside his body. He didn’t bother trying to hook it up yet—the idea of undergoing yet another surgery made him want to curl up in a ball and rock. He started off just poking around inside the arm, to see if there would be a way to configure it so that it was compatible.

“Not gonna lie, LB, the idea of hooking more stuff up to my body—not super into it. But, um. For Gortys, sure. Hey, what happened to her, anyway? And there’s all those guys, you know…those guys? Uh…Vaughn? Sasha? F…something with an F, crap, this is…I can _see_ her, I _know_ her name, it’s up there, it’s just not turning into words,” he said, snapping his fingers.

The sensation of finding a slimy blank space in his mind where he knew a word should be was one of the worst new symptoms since he’d woken up. That and the head-splitting migraines which left him dry-heaving and curled up on the ground in the dark for hours.

“Fiona,” said Loader Bot.

Rhys scrubbed his hand under his watering eyes. “Right. Fiona. Please never tell her that I forgot. I didn’t mean it. Please don't tell her.”

“I will not. I am sure she would understand.”

“Yeah. You know, a couple of those knocks on the head were her fault, anyway.”

He lost long spans of time each day. He would come to blinking down at a tool in his hand or standing in the middle of the greenhouse with no idea how he got there. It wasn’t a big deal. Sometimes he forgot where he was, who he was, what he was doing there. Sometimes he forgot that Jack was gone and went around talking to himself, waiting for the AI to reply and give him some assistance.

He could really use the help right about now. Even if it came from a sadistic maniac. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.

He wasted an entire afternoon pacing wobbly circles around the lab, trying to remember the word for the little green-handled twin blades in his hand. One moment there was a slimy void in his mind shaped just like the object, and the next the word slid into place as though it had been there all along.

“Scissors!” he yelled.

Knowing that they were called ‘scissors’ was of no importance at all to his task of using them to trim the burnt, ruined wires in his arm socket and inside Gortys. But if he lost the names for things, what was he? Far short of human, by his estimation. If he stopped calling things by their name, how could he expect them to obey the laws of nature? They might change right before his eyes, grow a will of their own and mutate. If he lost the use of language, by the time he ever got out of here (if he lived long enough to leave) he’d be unrecognizable, unreachable, unlovable. He was terrified that he would reunite with his friends only for them to not recognize him, and have no word for him, because he had in his time spent alone become some strange, solitary species, something far away from them.

He admitted defeat to the arm for a while and started working on the eye. He couldn’t afford to indulge his pride anymore. There was no use for it, no time. Nothing for it but to press onward. No Yvette around to tell him to cut the bullshit, no Fiona to pick up the slack, no Vaughn to coddle and comfort him. Just his own wits, his battered body, and Loader Bot’s sturdy presence beside him.

Pride may not be of use, but his vanity might be. He caught sight of himself in a window and stopped cold, brought his trembling hand up to his face.

“Dear God,” he said. “I look terrible. I look dead.”

“You have been traditionally more well-kept.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Rhys said, gulping and studying his gaunt face, his sunken eye sockets. It was like his skull was pressing forwards against his skin. He’d never needed to shave very often but now his face was scruffy, his hair greasy and tangled. There was a sallow pallor to his skin.

Rhys went into the bathroom and gripped the cool ceramic sink for a moment, bracing himself. Then he began peeling the bandages away. The scarring was worse than it had ever been. There would be no more easy disguising the puckered skin around the port with a little dab of concealer—now there were also the jagged gashes he’d dug into his face with the shard of glass, and the crude, messy ministrations of the auto-doc to contend with. It had done the job, saved him from infection and death via blood loss and sepsis, sure, but as for artistry it left much to be desired. Beneath the gauze pad his left eye was milky and white, scarred in the center. He was little better than blind in that eye without the ECHO net perceiving and processing the visual input and spoon-feeding it to his brain.

As for the arm, well…even Stacey might barf at the sight of it, he thought with a wry twist of his lips. The flesh around the metal was puffy and inflamed in a way it hadn’t been since the surgery, though he supposed that much was to be suspected. The inside of the synthetic socket was full of raggedly severed wiring and metal, and while it might not have been such a gruesome sight to those whose bodies weren’t made up of a significant amount of cybernetics, to Rhys it was tantamount to seeing his guts. There was something deeply wrong about all those innermost pieces being exposed to the light.

Rhys groaned. “How am I ever gonna fix this…this is a nightmare.”

Loader Bot clumsily patted him on the back. “There there. It will be alright. I too was badly damaged, but look at me now. Good as new. One day you will be too.”

“Thanks, LB,” Rhys said. “Glad one of us thinks so.”

No one was ever going to want to touch him again.

He was so sick of crying, so he didn’t. He shaved and trimmed his hair as best he could, and then he went back to work.

He found the laser array a few weeks after they arrived at Atlas.

He ran his hands over the sleek, deadly-looking equipment, and said in a hushed voice, “This might be it, LB. This stuff could really fix me up, if I can get it working. Which is a big if. But if…then…my, um, head jelly…”

“Brain.”

“Brain, it’s…I need something like this. I need this stuff to work.”

“The seizures are becoming more frequent. The time you spend unresponsive is increasing.”

“Exactly.”

“Then we will make it work.”

“You’re a good friend, LB. A better one than I ever was.”

“You have been a good friend to me. I never had one before. No one had ever projected friendship onto me until you.”

“Projected? Don’t put it like that. That’s like saying it isn’t real, like you…don’t feel it on your own.”

“I don’t mind.”

“But doesn’t it bother you? The idea you wouldn’t feel it on your own? Doesn’t that make you feel like, you know, less than human?”

“No. That idea does not trouble me. I was never the one pretending to be human.”

Rhys’ eyes widened. “What’s that supposed to—who’s pretending?”

Loader Bot was silent for a moment, then said, “I think now is the time for me to practice what is known as a ‘tactful silence.’”

“Are you talking about me?” Rhys said, pressing his hand to his chest, his voice going high and funny. “I’m the one you think’s pretending to be human?”

“I didn’t name names.”

“I _am_ human.”

“I will not dispute this belief. That is fine. It does not matter to me. I will only explain my ‘error’ by pointing out that you know as well as I do what the files say. Your cyberware crosses certain thresholds. Carries certain implications.”

“I’m human, LB,” Rhys said. “Having some augmentations doesn’t change that.”

“An impossible argument to conclude, given the ambiguous definition of ‘human.’ Very well, Rhys. You are as you say you are. But it is unhelpful to insist that your ‘augmentations’ are so superficial that they do not trouble what is meant by the word.”

“Let’s talk about the lasers. I’m _dying_ to talk about these _lasers._ If I calibrate them wrong, see, they’ll fry my brains, and that’s no good. But if I get it right—I just might live. I want to live, I think. Yes. It won’t fix everything, but it’ll do. I’ll make it work. And then everything will start falling into place. New eye, new arm, boom—I’m Rhys again, right? All in one piece. And then I’ll be well enough to work more on Gortys, and then—and then we can go look for everyone else, right? Right? I’m really worried about them, LB. I miss them. When I remember to miss them, I do. Really, really bad. I’m scared I’ll forget. I don’t want to.”

“We will go and find them very soon. Gortys’ chassis is almost complete.”

Rhys hugged the chassis to his chest. He liked to keep it near him. He kissed the top of it and said, “Poor Gortys. She’ll be better soon.”

“And so will you.”

Rhys gave Loader Bot a fond pat on the arm. It was the best he could do by way of thanks at the moment.

In the end, the greatest difficulty in the laser operation was putting his head inside the machine, and that was really saying something, because configuring the damn thing took days. Many a tear was shed. He had a bald spot where he’d torn his hair out.

“This is fine,” he said, seated in the chair in the middle of the room, finger hovering over the button which would strap him in and lower the diabolical machine down over his body. “This is going to be fine. I can do this.”

“You can,” said Loader Bot.

“I have to. But I don’t want to. I’m scared, LB. Really scared. Like, so scared I might throw up, I think. I haven’t had great luck with dangerous things going near my head lately. How many lucky breaks do you get in one life, do you think? Can’t be many.”

“I will be here the whole time. You are highly capable. Over the past few weeks you have been very strong, and Gortys is lucky to have one such as you working hard to fix her.”

Rhys gasped in a shuddering breath. “You know just what to say, LB. Damn. Shit. Let’s do this,” he said, and pressed the button.

He survived the lasers and all that meant was that he’d stolen a little more time, he didn’t know how much, but all he could do was hope he got away with it. The port was as cleaned up and functional as it was going to get at the moment. He found a clear plug for it, and that at least worked wonders for his sense of security, knowing that nothing would be forcing its way in there again.

The new eye was as close to brown as he could manage. It had a metallic golden glint when the light hit it, which half of him was very flattered by, the old half which would have liked something even gaudier, while the new half flinched away from the obvious tell that parts of him were artificial. Inhuman or not, as soon as the familiar data stream was once more part of his vision, relief knocked the breath right out of him and he got weak at the knees. He had to sit down. God, he’d missed that—it was like having one of his senses plucked right out of his head, nearly as disabling as if he’d gone totally blind or deaf. He felt almost like himself again. Whatever that meant.

The arm was trouble. The cyberware inside it and inside his own body didn’t want to link up, and the machine he was using to help him install it was reluctant as well, correctly recognizing the two units as essentially incompatible, despite all the tweaks he’d made. He had to trick all three of them. Hacking his own body was…not something he was prepared to do. It felt icky, messing with his own inner workings like that, like being asked to perform your own open-heart surgery, but worse, because that was his whole self running through those circuits, it shouldn’t get tampered with. So he focused mostly on tricking the arm and the machine.

The installation was painful. He held Loader Bot’s hand the whole time, squeezing the metal digits until they dug into his flesh. He had to be strapped down so he wouldn’t jerk. When he began to hyperventilate and get light-headed, the machine administered a mild sedative, and after that he watched limply as the foreign hunk of metal was hooked up to his body.

When Jack was in his head he’d felt invaded, violated. This was something like that. Of course, it wasn’t quite the same, since the arm had no mind of its own (hopefully) but as far as the feeling of having something alien grafted onto his flesh and become part of him, well. That was never going to be pleasant.

It was a sleek piece of equipment, but as far as comfort and dexterity went, his old arm was miles ahead. The machine beeped warnings throughout the whole procedure about furthering nerve damage, incompatible software, etc., etc., all of which he ignored. Once it was hanging heavy off his body it could be denied no longer. Whenever he moved it he felt an odd twinge, which was sometimes less of a twinge and more of an _oh fuck shit_ excruciating agony, _get this thing off me_. Sometimes a pins-and-needles numbness radiated outwards from his shoulder down his back and up his neck. The fingers couldn’t curl all the way into a fist and it was never going to have the fine motor movement he’d been hoping would help speed along his work on Gortys, but he’d make do. It wasn’t a big deal.

He’d been so glad to have his eye restored that he was shocked by how discomfiting he found the arm. Shouldn’t he be glad to be whole again?

He didn’t feel whole. He felt broken, he felt like a monster, crudely stapled together with mismatched parts.

He spent a lot of time crying on the floor of the shower with the hot water soothing his clammy skin.

When he was done he picked himself up off the floor. For the first time since all the new operations he looked at himself in the mirror. The skin around his shoulder and port was as puckered and red as it had been when he’d first gotten the implants, and twice as scarred. He couldn’t stand looking at it for long. His hair was messy. That was something he could do something about, at least.

He’d been messing around in the quick-change station in his spare time. It was the most fun he had aside from playing I-Spy with Loader Bot—call him shallow, but he’d always loved playing with appearances. Clothes were about the extent to which you could choose how you appeared to other people, and of course, in his case, if the way he dressed was eye-catching, he thought it somehow made the obvious cybernetics less…cartoonish, somehow. He’d never say that out loud to anybody. It was a stupid sentiment, and probably the opposite was true, but all the same, no matter how much Yvette and Vaughn groaned and teased about his wardrobe, he’d never met a gaudy outfit he didn’t love at least a little.

He’d never been one for all black ensembles, but when he found the outfit he actually said ‘wow’ out loud, and anyway, a significant amount of his body had been recently replaced, so maybe a little change was in order.

Rhys stood in front of the mirror, tugging his cuffs down and smoothing the shirt against his chest. He tugged at the collar. God, it was going to be sweltering out there.

“How do I look?”

“Clothed,” said Loader Bot.

“Gee, thanks. I mean do I look, you know. Good?”

“You look the same as you have always looked.”

Rhys patted Loader Bot on the arm. “Not true, but nice to hear it anyway. Alright. I’m ready to pretend to be kidnapped. Shouldn’t be hard, I’ve had a lot of practice with the damsel in distress thing lately. Time to get Fiona?”

“Yes. Very soon we will know the truth. She has the last piece of Gortys.”

“And then we’ll beat the monster and open the vault?”

“Yes.”

“Alright,” Rhys said, his voice breathy from nerves. He took one last look at himself, grimaced, and looked up at Loader Bot. “No problem. I, uh, eat monsters for breakfast.”

When he saw Fiona he had to pretend he was shocked and indignant, because apparently Loader Bot had a theatrical streak and far be it from Rhys to spoil his elaborate truth-finding plan, but he couldn’t stop a huge, toothy grin from spreading across his face as his heart soared and she was just how he’d remembered, a complicated blend of charming and silly and clever and dangerous, and somehow still with that undercurrent of fragile hope.

He saw her, and he was glad that he had lived. He did not know how much longer it would last, but he was glad that he was there.


End file.
